Throughout this tutorial, we’ll walk you through the creation of a basic
poll application.

It’ll consist of two parts:

A public site that lets people view polls and vote in them.

An admin site that lets you add, change, and delete polls.

We’ll assume you have Django installed already. You can
tell Django is installed and which version by running the following command:

$ python -m django --version

If Django is installed, you should see the version of your installation. If it
isn’t, you’ll get an error telling “No module named django”.

This tutorial is written for Django 1.10 and Python 3.4 or later. If the
Django version doesn’t match, you can refer to the tutorial for your version
of Django by using the version switcher at the bottom right corner of this
page, or update Django to the newest version. If you are still using Python
2.7, you will need to adjust the code samples slightly, as described in
comments.

If this is your first time using Django, you’ll have to take care of some
initial setup. Namely, you’ll need to auto-generate some code that establishes a
Django project – a collection of settings for an instance of Django,
including database configuration, Django-specific options and
application-specific settings.

From the command line, cd into a directory where you’d like to store your
code, then run the following command:

You’ll need to avoid naming projects after built-in Python or Django
components. In particular, this means you should avoid using names like
django (which will conflict with Django itself) or test (which
conflicts with a built-in Python package).

Where should this code live?

If your background is in plain old PHP (with no use of modern frameworks),
you’re probably used to putting code under the Web server’s document root
(in a place such as /var/www). With Django, you don’t do that. It’s
not a good idea to put any of this Python code within your Web server’s
document root, because it risks the possibility that people may be able
to view your code over the Web. That’s not good for security.

Put your code in some directory outside of the document root, such as
/home/mycode.

Let’s verify your Django project works. Change into the outer mysite directory, if
you haven’t already, and run the following commands:

$ python manage.py runserver

You’ll see the following output on the command line:

Performing system checks...
System check identified no issues (0 silenced).
You have unapplied migrations; your app may not work properly until they are applied.
Run 'python manage.py migrate' to apply them.
November 23, 2017 - 15:50:53
Django version 1.10, using settings 'mysite.settings'
Starting development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C.

Note

Ignore the warning about unapplied database migrations for now; we’ll deal
with the database shortly.

You’ve started the Django development server, a lightweight Web server written
purely in Python. We’ve included this with Django so you can develop things
rapidly, without having to deal with configuring a production server – such as
Apache – until you’re ready for production.

Now’s a good time to note: don’t use this server in anything resembling a
production environment. It’s intended only for use while developing. (We’re in
the business of making Web frameworks, not Web servers.)

Now that the server’s running, visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/ with your Web
browser. You’ll see a “Welcome to Django” page, in pleasant, light-blue pastel.
It worked!

Changing the port

By default, the runserver command starts the development server
on the internal IP at port 8000.

If you want to change the server’s port, pass
it as a command-line argument. For instance, this command starts the server
on port 8080:

$ python manage.py runserver 8080

If you want to change the server’s IP, pass it along with the port. So to
listen on all public IPs (useful if you want to show off your work on other
computers on your network), use:

$ python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Full docs for the development server can be found in the
runserver reference.

The development server automatically reloads Python code for each request
as needed. You don’t need to restart the server for code changes to take
effect. However, some actions like adding files don’t trigger a restart,
so you’ll have to restart the server in these cases.

Now that your environment – a “project” – is set up, you’re set to start
doing work.

Each application you write in Django consists of a Python package that follows
a certain convention. Django comes with a utility that automatically generates
the basic directory structure of an app, so you can focus on writing code
rather than creating directories.

Projects vs. apps

What’s the difference between a project and an app? An app is a Web
application that does something – e.g., a Weblog system, a database of
public records or a simple poll app. A project is a collection of
configuration and apps for a particular website. A project can contain
multiple apps. An app can be in multiple projects.

Your apps can live anywhere on your Python path. In
this tutorial, we’ll create our poll app right next to your manage.py
file so that it can be imported as its own top-level module, rather than a
submodule of mysite.

To create your app, make sure you’re in the same directory as manage.py
and type this command:

The include() function allows referencing other
URLconfs. Note that the regular expressions for the
include() function doesn’t have a $ (end-of-string
match character) but rather a trailing slash. Whenever Django encounters
include(), it chops off whatever part of the URL
matched up to that point and sends the remaining string to the included URLconf
for further processing.

The idea behind include() is to make it easy to
plug-and-play URLs. Since polls are in their own URLconf
(polls/urls.py), they can be placed under “/polls/”, or under
“/fun_polls/”, or under “/content/polls/”, or any other path root, and the
app will still work.

You should always use include() when you include other URL patterns.
admin.site.urls is the only exception to this.

Doesn’t match what you see?

If you’re seeing include(admin.site.urls) instead of just
admin.site.urls, you’re probably using a version of Django that
doesn’t match this tutorial version. You’ll want to either switch to the
older tutorial or the newer Django version.

You have now wired an index view into the URLconf. Lets verify it’s
working, run the following command:

$ python manage.py runserver

Go to http://localhost:8000/polls/ in your browser, and you should see the
text “Hello, world. You’re at the polls index.”, which you defined in the
index view.

The url() function is passed four arguments, two
required: regex and view, and two optional: kwargs, and name.
At this point, it’s worth reviewing what these arguments are for.

The term “regex” is a commonly used short form meaning “regular expression”,
which is a syntax for matching patterns in strings, or in this case, url
patterns. Django starts at the first regular expression and makes its way down
the list, comparing the requested URL against each regular expression until it
finds one that matches.

Note that these regular expressions do not search GET and POST parameters, or
the domain name. For example, in a request to
https://www.example.com/myapp/, the URLconf will look for myapp/. In a
request to https://www.example.com/myapp/?page=3, the URLconf will also
look for myapp/.

If you need help with regular expressions, see Wikipedia’s entry and the
documentation of the re module. Also, the O’Reilly book “Mastering
Regular Expressions” by Jeffrey Friedl is fantastic. In practice, however,
you don’t need to be an expert on regular expressions, as you really only need
to know how to capture simple patterns. In fact, complex regexes can have poor
lookup performance, so you probably shouldn’t rely on the full power of regexes.

Finally, a performance note: these regular expressions are compiled the first
time the URLconf module is loaded. They’re super fast (as long as the lookups
aren’t too complex as noted above).

When Django finds a regular expression match, Django calls the specified view
function, with an HttpRequest object as the first
argument and any “captured” values from the regular expression as other
arguments. If the regex uses simple captures, values are passed as positional
arguments; if it uses named captures, values are passed as keyword arguments.
We’ll give an example of this in a bit.

Naming your URL lets you refer to it unambiguously from elsewhere in Django,
especially from within templates. This powerful feature allows you to make
global changes to the URL patterns of your project while only touching a single
file.

When you’re comfortable with the basic request and response flow, read
part 2 of this tutorial to start working with the
database.